Paradigm Shift
by Ophium
Summary: If a hunt sounds too good to be true, than it probably isn’t. Victor Henricksen is on the hunt for a monster, a psychopath murderer by the name of Dean Winchester. This time, he caught him. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

**PARADIGM SHIFT**

"Did that guy look kind of shady to you? He looked kind of shady to me..." Dean said, hand going around his back to trade his sawed-off for the EMF reader.

"Dean, he's a terrified old man whose wife burned to death a month ago, only to show up in his cellar... what exactly in there sounds shady to you?"

"I think it was the mustache... did ya see the size of that thing? I swear to you... I saw the remains of a dead rat in there... at least I think it was dead-"

"You're impossible," Sam said with a chuckle. There was something about this job that wasn't sitting quite right with him either, but he couldn't put his finger on it. Maybe it was the fact that Dean's time was running out and Hell was getting closer with each passing day, or maybe it was just the fact that this case had literally fallen in their laps. Conveniently so.

Granted, in their line of work, that wasn't that much of a stretch, given that trouble seemed able to find them in the most unlikely of places. But still, there weren't that many times in which they opened the newspaper and saw an add asking for '_supernatural specialists to deal with personal matter of the utmost importance_'. The fact that the person was willing to pay well for the '_dealing_' part was all too clearly implied.

Dean had jumped at the opportunity of an actual paying job. And the reasons why he'd jumped still made Sam's stomach churn every single time he thought about them.

Dean was stockpiling. For harsher days. Namely, for when he was burning in Hell.

If Sam knew his brother well -and he did- he knew that somewhere, somehow, Dean had started some sort of funding. Maybe a bank account, maybe a post-office locker, heck, maybe a sock in his duffel,... but somehow, Sam knew that Dean was saving up money so that Sam wouldn't have to hustle pool, or cheat at poker, or apply for credit cards named after dead rock stars or fictional characters after Dean himself was gone.

There was no point in even saying a word against it or even asking him to stop. It was just one of those things that Dean figured he had to do to keep his little brother safe and Sam –being said little brother- had no vote in the matter.

On the other hand, with all the extra time that Dean had been spending in bars lately, it did give Sam more opportunities to search for a way out of the that damn deal.

It also meant that paying jobs were candy these days: sweet and tasty no matter what color and shape they presented themselves.

So, yes, the old man looked sort of shady, with his over-indulgent mustache and beard and his loaded house, but he was paying and until they had proof of anything, it was nothing but a hunch. The fact that it was a hunch shared by both him and Dean did set his nerves a bit on edge, though. "What's the EMF saying?"

Dean showed him the silent gadget. "Nada, not even the spirit of a past cockroach," he said, managing to sound disappointed. "You'd think that a house this big and old would have at least a couple of skeletons in the closet."

"Well, Mr. Garrison did say that it was well past midnight when he saw the spirit... maybe she only shows up around then?"

"Yeah, maybe. But I have a better idea – we know where the old lady is buried... why don't we save ourselves some trouble and just burn the ol'gal's bones and collect our five hundred?" Dean suggested, for the tenth time in a row.

"And if this turns out to be something else other than Mrs. Garrison's spirit... what then?"

"Well, at least we'd made sure that she would never _turn_ in to one," Dean muttered. "Call it an insurance policy... I bet you we can even squeeze the old man for some extra cash for that," he added with a pair of dancing eyebrows.

Sam, who was too busy opening old cabinets and looking at titles on the sides of some even older books, ignored both the dance and the suggestion. Dean stored the useless EMF and paused in the middle of the cellar, his eyes searching the room for anything that might help them.

There wasn't much there. Some gardening tools, a couple of broken chairs, a worn mattress propped against one wall with springs leaking through the worn fabric, shelves loaded with dusty books, jars of all sizes and shapes filled with unidentifiable gunk, some rusty construction tools and a couple of old cabinets. The naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling was low voltage and so covered in dust and grease that it might as well have been turned off instead of on.

Their only other source of light, coming from the upstairs entrance, dimmed signifying when someone stepped through the threshold of the door.

"Mr. Garrison, we told you -- it's not really safe for you to come down here," Sam warned the man on top of the stairs.

"You have that one right, Sam," a deep voice, deeper than the old man's, answered. Both Winchesters turned in unison to see the satisfied smile on the face of the speaker at the top of the stairs. The smile didn't quite reach his hard eyes as he took one step down. "Hello boys."

There was no need to ask or confirm his identity; Dean and Sam remembered all too well the separate 'interviews' that the FBI agent had subjected them to while they were waiting to be transferred to Green River Detention Center. Henricksen.

There was no need to figure out a course of action; the same strategic way of thinking had been drilled in to both Winchesters by their father as they grew up and even thought they were trapped in what looked like a dead end, each brother scattered away from the light and chose a place to defend.

The next move in their little game of cat-and-mouse was Henricksen's.

"Come on guys... there's really no point in playing hide and seek," the FBI man said. "I've got the place surrounded... just surrender yourselves and no one gets hurt."

The man had a point, Sam could admit that much. But there was the fact that Dean was wanted for murder and was facing a possible death sentence, so that would hurt a bit; and then, there was also the minor case of a debt to a crossroads demon, who would be showing up to collect in less than ten months time – that would hurt a lot. If all else failed and Sam couldn't break Dean's deal, he wasn't going to sit by and watch his brother rot behind bars for whatever time he had left, only to die and be thrown in to an even worse sort of imprisonment.

So, no, they were not going to cooperate with Henricksen, no even by a long shot, and not while there was still hope of them getting out of there alive.

"How'd you even find us?" Dean asked, his voice echoing around the small place and seemingly coming from everywhere.

Even in the dark, Sam managed to find Dean's figure, hunched behind the old mattress. Dean wasn't even looking at the FBI man. His fingers were busy with something that Sam couldn't see from his spot.

"Come on Dean... magician doesn't tell his secrets," Henricksen replied, the smile invisible but shinning through his tone. The man was clearly pleased with himself for having them trapped.

"The old man sold us out, hum?" Sam heard his brother ask from across the cellar. "Told you he looked shady, Sammy."

Sam didn't needed super powers to understand what was Dean's plan and see the mindless chitchat for what it really was. Whatever Dean was working on, it was noisy and he needed Henricksen distracted.

"Yeah, well... next time try to give me more than mutant, rat-eating beards," Sam shouted back.

Now that they'd both given their positions away, Sam could see Henricksen venturing a couple more steps down, gun raised and pointed straight ahead, body quickly hidden from view as soon as he stopped. The beam of the flashlight in the man's hand passed eerily close to the place where Sam was hiding. "Oh, the old man is legit... he truly believes that Mrs. Wacko is haunting the ground beneath his feet... that was why he was so perfect."

"Perfect for what?" Sam asked, hoping to launch Henricksen in to one of those bad-guy monologues that Dean despised so much. He had no idea what Dean was up to, but Sam was willing to buy him as much time as he could.

Because right now? It was a toss between whatever derange plan Dean was cooking and a suicide charge against the armed federal.

"Come on guys... you really think I'm that stupid?"

"You really want me to answer that?" Dean's voice echoed across the cellar.

Victor's gun immediately zeroed in on him. From the agent's angle, Sam was sure he couldn't see more than springs and a dirty mattress. Still, of he decided to shot, those wouldn't offer that much of a protection.

"I figure what you boys do, or rather," the FBI man said with a dry chuckle, "what you boys _think_ you do... It's funny, but I hadn't pegged you for being _that_ kind of wacko. I guess crazy really runs in the family."

The pause in Dean's working hands could either be a reaction to the sting of the man's words or a sign that he'd finished whatever the hell he'd been doing. Sam hoped it was the latter.

"You have no idea what you're talking about," Dean's veiled and carefully controlled voice answered.

"Oh... I know enough... I know about the way you two were raised, I know about the red flags your daddy stirred up in the Child Protection Services, I know about the things in the trunk of your car and how you use them. The rest I can guess. Strict, violent and lonely father on the road with two small boys, no one around to stop him from knocking you around a couple of times, no one to... comfort him. I saw a picture of your mother, Dean. Lovely lady – daddy ever told you you look _just_ like her?"

"You're a dick—you're daddy ever told you that?" Dean hissed.

Henricksen's only reaction was a mirthless laugh. "I told you before, Dean: I know your type and your type is predictable."

Moving under the protection that the conversation between the two men offered, Sam managed to get closer to his brother to get a better handle of what he was up to.

Behind the cabinet, wedged between the wooden piece and the mattress, Dean was messing around with bottles and large bags. Chemicals bottles.

It was too dark for him to read, but from the shape and size, Sam could guess at least a bag of fertilizer and one of bleach.

"That's a shame Victor, 'cause I aim to surprise."

Sam paused and took a deep breath. There was a keen tang of bleach fumes already in the air, which meant that his brother had wasted no time in soaking the mattress through. Dean wasn't nuts enough to...

"Come on... you really think you can escape this situation? There's no gullible female lawyer in here for you to fool in to helping you, Dean... no tricks this time..."

Sam lost track of the conversation going on between the fed and his brother. Instead, his mind tracked furiously, calculating the odds of them surviving if Dean did what Sam was sure he was preparing to do.

The house was old, and its termite-infested foundation didn't look all that sturdy. Granted, Dean had picked the one wall that was far enough from the main road and the front of the house that might provide them with cover enough to make their escape. Also, the fact that it just happened to be the only wall that wasn't completely underground... but all of that was working on the assumption that the whole house wouldn't just fall on their heads in the mean time.

Home made explosives had always been a hobby of Dean's, but they weren't the most accurate of explosions to control. A couple of destroyed motel kitchens and a few escapes in the middle of the night attested that quite well.

Sam's only hint that Dean wanted him to get ready was a look sent in the general direction his brother guessed him to be. And then Dean stepped from behind the mattress.

"You're right Victor... no tricks this time," he said, taking a step towards the armed man.

"Stop right there!" The FBI man blared, his stance rock still as he aimed light and gun muzzle in Dean's direction. "Hands where I can see them!"

Dean calmly raised his hands, lighter concealed in the fingers behind his head. He smiled.

Sam panicked. Dean was too close. Henricksen hadn't allowed him to move much further away from the explosives –-Dean was too close and he was smiling. Sam knew that signal well. It was his count down. 3... 2...

Sam ducked. The resounding BOOM! in the small cellar shook the whole place; up, down and sideways. Hands around his ears, Sam closed his eyes, knowing full well his actions offered little protection from the explosive or its aftermath. Still, he'd been quick and that alone resulted in him avoiding the majority of the flying debris.

Before the dust cleared, Sam was in motion, angling for the new hole that had opened in the far wall, light streaming shyly from outside.

"Moff –cough- move and I'll shoot!" Victor's voice was disembodied but solid, a menacing sound quickly followed be the ominous cocking of a gun.

Sam froze in his escape route, searching for the FBI man's location. With the air still unsettled, he saw only swirling sawdust and shredded paper. Two silhouettes began to take shape some ten feet from where Sam stood. Above them, the feet of at least fifteen armed guards could already be heard, scurrying around, some barking orders to evacuate and others yelling Henricksen's name.

Sam took two steps forward. This was their last chance to get out, to escape the FBI before the debris covering the cellar's entrance cleared and the place was flooded with men carrying badges and even more guns. He was sure that Henricksen was aiming on a hunch only, so, if he could just pull Dean...

Four things happened next, too close to be seen as anything more than inevitable or fate, too fast to be stopped or counted as separate events.

Over the shouting of men and the sound of debris still landing, the house groaned. It was a deep, moaning sound, sad, like the whole structure had given up on existence.

At the same time, either because he'd heard it too, or due to some deep engraved hunter's instinct, Dean started to move, yelling a "SAM, GET OUT!"

Henricksen, either having heard the faint noise that announced the coming doom, or because he saw the Dean-shaped shadow moving, fired his gun.

The crack of the firearm was completely engulfed by the deafening noise of the whole floor disappearing beneath their feet.

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"Sammy! –cough— Sammy!"

Henricksen groaned and rolled his head away from the noise. There was a marching band doing drum practice, banging the same song over and over again in his head and the constant shouting was not helping matters.

"Sammy..."

The name didn't mean much to him, but he recognized that voice. The sentiment behind the strained words, he could well guess: Despair. Possession.

One of the first files he'd read on the Winchesters had been their psychological profiles. Sam's read like the typical bright kid whose personality is completely subjugated by the older brother and the batshit crazy father.

John Winchester, ex-marine, had raised his kids to be some sort of commandos of some private guerrilla war that had been going on inside the man's head for God knew how long.

And Dean... Dean was just the run of the mill kid who got twisted and turned by his deranged father and helped him corrupt the younger kid. It was all there, it was all very predictable and cliché to the point of tears.

And of all things to come to his mind after the whole frigging house coming down on his head, _that_ was what Victor managed to remember first...

The whole setting of the trap for the Winchesters, their conversation in the cellar while he'd waited for the reinforcements to arrive, the subsequent explosion and cave-in... those came after. As did the anger at having become the latest in the long list of Dean Winchester's victims.

The rough voice –Dean-, was still yelling for the younger brother, which told the fed one thing for certain: Victor was trapped with at least one of the criminals that he was bent on bringing to justice.

Doing a quick inventory of his battered body, the FBI man deemed himself quite lucky. Other than the ostrich size egg-bump on his hand, his sore left arm and bloodied ankle, he'd come out of this relatively unscathed.

The flashlight that he'd been carrying was buried under a couple of pieces of broken wood, its light dimmed but still on. Pushing himself to his elbows, Victor shoved the rubble away and closed his fingers around the metal base.

He turned the beam up and felt a cold fist of fear wrap itself around his stomach. They were in some sort of natural cave, filled with small, shimmering pieces of mineral reflecting back the light in his hands from the walls. The FBI man followed them up until the light beam hit the ceiling of the cave. What he saw there squashed whatever was left of Henricksen's hopes of an easy and swift rescue.

The hole through which they had fallen was at least twenty feet away and sealed shut by something brown and large. Probably the whole house. Which meant that there was a lot of debris to be cleared up above ground before any rescue team even found the cave they were in. And that was if they ever found the hole in the ground.

Which meant that they were kinda screwed.

"Sammy... that you?"

Remembering that he wasn't alone in there, the FBI man looked for his gun amongst the scraps of wood, glass and cement that had fallen all over them. It was in vain. Half the junk that had been stored in the cellar and half the debris that the explosion had caused, had fallen in with them.

"Sammy... please, answer me."

The older Winchester sounded pathetically needy and slightly out of breath. Looking for him was easier than locating the gun.

Many things had been written about Dean Winchester in his FBI file; astute, charming, dangerous. The true makings of any psychopath and Victor had seen all of those in action. If he was to be honest with himself, Henricksen would say that, more than being trapped underground with a slim prospect of rescue, he was more creeped out by the fact that he was weaponless and trapped underground with a murdering psychopath.

When he did find Dean amongst the rest of the debris, Henricksen realized that he had no reason to really fear anything. Dean Winchester was going no where.

He'd managed to land on one of the shelves that had been littered with old books and broken knickknacks. The wooden piece, shattered from the fall, had impaled the Winchester's right side and was sticking up in the air above his hipbone like a red, shiny pole.

Victor pointed his flashlight at the man's face, taking in the pallor intersected with the strings of red coming from a bloody gash near his hairline.

"Well, they do say that what goes around, comes around," the FBI man said, a barely concealed note of satisfaction in his voice.

The look of disappointment on Dean's face at realizing that it wasn't his brother doing the waving around of the flashlight was quickly replaced by a cold stone mask. The mask, however, wasn't effective enough to hide the concern in his voice. Or the pain.

"Where's Sam?"

"Not here," Victor said matter of factually, as he turned the light away to search their little pocket of air. "But I'm sure he didn't go far. My men were all over the place."

"Don't see any here," Dean said in between coughs.

The air was slowly settling in, dust landing gently all around them. Still, no way out made itself apparent to Victor's searching light. With no ventilation hole that he could see, Henricksen wasn't putting much faith in their having breathable air for much longer. Twenty minutes, half an hour, tops.

Bare rock in the dark, however, could be very tricky to the human eye and there was no telling what twists and turns the wall up ahead of them possessed until they were on top of it. But a cave that size? It couldn't be isolated from the rest of the cave systems that the area was filled with.

"We need to move," Henricksen announced.

Dean chuckled. And then gasped, a half-bitten moan barely escaping his lips. "Sure... you go right ahead... and do just that – I'll stick around... grown quite _attached_ to the place."

Henricksen's light fell on the bloody piece of wood again. "I can see that."

Working in the Bureau had always been about prioritizing and getting your actions right. One decision in the wrong direction at the wrong time and you're done. And what's worse, the people you're trying to protect are done.

His superiors had charged Victor Henricksen with one task: capture Dean Winchester and bring him to justice. Dead or alive. And given the charges that he faced? '_Dead_' was too merciful for a piece of scum like Dean.

The capturing part had been tricky enough. The Milwaukee bank assault had literally fallen in his lap shortly after he'd been given his mission. He'd barely had time to read through the whole file the Bureau had on the man before he was being shipped off to Milwaukee.

A quick read through had, even so, revealed quite a few interesting facts about the man who had been able to forge his own death to escape authorities.

The father was his biggest clue in to the inner workings of Dean Winchester. Ex-marine who lost his wife in suspicious circumstances and was left to raise his kids alone, on the road, giving them no sense of security or normalcy. All in all, the worst kind of paramilitary-survivalist life-style, guaranteed to screw with any kid's head.

Victor told himself that, that first time Dean Winchester escaped right out from under his nose, it was because he hadn't had the time to really study the man and conduct a real investigation. He wasn't familiar with what made Dean tick; he didn't know how he would react to being trapped. He wasn't counting on Dean being that smart.

The second time, Victor blamed it on Dean's accomplices. He had never been able to prove it, but the FBI agent was sure that the lawyer and the prison guard had been in on it with the Winchesters. Just their luck, to land themselves in the one prison where one of the guards _happened_ to be an ex-Marine, just like John Winchester.

This time, though, this time Henricksen had not allowed for any external liabilities. He and his team had controlled all the information that leaked out, all the variables, all the players so that the outcome could be only one –well, all the variables except for the crazy old man, who had only agreed to help them if they assured him that his wife's ghost would be taken care of. A _ghost_ for fucks sake!

... so much crazy people in this world...

Still, cave-in or no cave-in, Victor had caught his man, just like he had always intended. Now it was just a matter of keeping him alive and getting him out of there so that he could be brought to justice.

And he couldn't really do anything about the second part before he took care of the first. "Where else are you hurt?"

Dean startled awake, or jumped back in to conscious. It was hard to tell in the dark and Victor hadn't really been paying attention to when the other man had closed his eyes.

"Where's Sam? Is he ok?" Dean asked again.

Henricksen's patience was too hard pressed to be answering the same question over and over again. His silence, however, was answered by the sounds of pain filled grunts and gravel rolling away and sliding. Dean was actually trying to get his hand flat against the floor, clearly trying to get up and look for Sam himself.

Henricksen rolled his eyes and moved to secure the other man. Even if he did managed to get himself off the floor, from the angle that piece of wood was, he would only succeed in further impaling himself. "Will you stop being stupid? Sit still! I already told you Sam isn't here!"

"Get the fuck away from me!" Dean shouted, his voice bouncing off the cave walls, quickly followed by his panting breaths. "Who... who the hell are you?"

Henricksen blinked, paused, trying to judge if this was some sort of trick being played on him. But then again, what could Dean possibly gain from playing the amnesia/confusion card on him? Get him with his guard down and run away?

The wound on Dean's side pretty much meant that, if anyone was vulnerable in there, it was Dean himself.

The FBI man's gaze also took in the nasty wound on Winchester's forehead. There was no trick in the painful way that gash kept oozing blood down Dean's face, or the way his eyes wouldn't open both at the same time or fully, for that matter.

Maybe the confusion was genuine. Maybe this was the break (no pun intended) this case needed in order to dismantle once and for all the doubts and dubious circumstances surrounding it.

"We were in a cave-in," Victor started to explain, gently nearing the trapped man. Careful to clear only the debris that was already loose and wouldn't cause for more sharp things to fall on his prisoner, Henricksen spoke in the smooth, soothing tones that he usually saved for traumatized victims and mentally challenged witnesses, or colleagues. "I fell in with you."

"And Sammy?"

Henricksen hoped that the younger brother had been caught by the men he'd spread through out the perimeter of the house. While Sam was not the priority here, after all the trouble that he'd gone through to set this trap for both Winchesters, they could not afford to allow either one of them to escape. "He's not here... I'm sure he's ok."

"Ok... do – do I know you?"

Victor paused to think what he was going to say. To tell the injured man who he really was, was to insure that Dean would be fighting him and being a general pain in the ass... a dangerous pain in the ass. On the other hand, if he lied, none of the information he gathered here could be used in court. "I'm a hunter," Victor said, settling for a half-truth.

"We were hunting together?"

Victor scrunched his eyes. It had taken him a while to piece together the Winchesters M.O. The weird killings before they even showed their faces; the desperate victims so shocked out of their minds that they'd believe in just about anything; the elaborate lies about occult crap and satanic rituals mumbo-jumbo... all for the sake of getting their kicks. Father and his two sons, a family of murderers and batshit crazies.

"Your father sent me here to help you with..." What exactly did these wackos call this? A case? A hunt? A wild goose-chase for their imaginary friends? "... with the ghost."

The answer, however insane it had sounded in the FBI man's head, seemed to appease Dean's curiosity. The injured man sagged back to the ground and closed his eyes, his brow twitching whenever he breathed too deep.

After a quick, cursory inventory of any other injuries Dean had sustained, Victor leaned back, satisfied to realize that other than the piece of wood protruding from his hip and the head injury, he'd suffered only small cuts and bruises like the ones he himself was parading around. But, if they wanted to get out of there, that piece of wood would have to come out.

Despite what the criminals that he hunted might think or say, Victor Henricksen was not a cruel man. He didn't enjoy causing pain on a fellow human being.

Fortunately for him, Dean's file had been filled with colorful and very graphic pictures of the various victims that this psychopath had left behind, plenty of proof that this was no fellow human... this was a monster that he was dealing with. And he had no trouble causing pain to monsters.

"My father sent you, hmm?" Dean asked, cutting through Henricksen's inspection of his injuries. "You're either a very good... psychic... or a very bad... liar."

The FBI agent raised one eyebrow and wondered just what the hell that was supposed to mean. Storing the information for later, Victor focused instead on the bloody, slippery piece of wood as his fingers closed around it. Adjusting his grip carefully, he used the other hand to secure Dean to the ground.

"This is gonna hurt," Victor warned at the same time that he yanked the protruding piece of wood up and out.

The scream that followed was deafening, eerie in the way it echoed, ricocheting off the walls long before Dean Winchester lost conscious.

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It was like everything was moving in slow motion, but still Sam wasn't fast enough to do anything.

His mind shut down, his body took over. And the body has only one purpose and objective. Survival.

And for a couple of seconds, Sam firmly believed that he had failed even at that. He was underground. All around him, he could only see dirty, breath dirty, taste dirty.

This was twelve years old Sam's nightmare. That first time he'd seen his father and older brother dig up a coffin in the cemetery of some small town he'd already forgotten the name of, this was what kept Sam awake at night. It wasn't the eerie vision of a cemetery lightened by nothing but moonlight and flashlights; it wasn't the sound of rotten wood breaking under their shovels; it wasn't even the smell of decay and fuel and fire that made him gag and loose his dinner at the time. It was the image of his family, the only people he had in this world, shoveling their way deeper and deeper in to the ground until they disappeared and he was left all alone.

It was the knowledge that only corpses were meant to be fed to the earth. The fear that the earth would get hungry enough to eat him anyway.

Not really sure which way was down and which way was up, Sam started to frantically dig his way out, nails breaking and stuffing themselves with dirt, breath coming in short pants that did nothing more than raise small clouds of dust and remind Sam that his lungs were burning up with hunger.

Sam wasn't sure how, but he found himself outside, looking at the ruins of what had been a two story house just minutes ago. The sky had darkened since they'd gone inside and now, red lights, blue lights and grey dust hid the stars above.

Looking around in hope of finding Dean there with him, Sam's hope sunk lower and lower as he saw the destruction that surrounded him. Dean hadn't made it out. Sam knew that.

Dean had been standing too far from the hole in the wall and Henricksen had fired his gun... Dean hadn't make it outside—

There was some shouting coming from the other side of the debris, officers calling for all their men, counting heads and rearranging themselves to form rescue parties.

Sam managed to stop himself from screaming for his brother too. The tears running down his face, however, he could not stop.

There was no way anyone could've survived that wreckage, not where Dean and Henricksen were standing, not with the whole house to fall on them.

A sob escaped Sam's mouth before he covered it with both hands, fingers stinging from the pressure. Dean couldn't be dead.

It was too soon. He still had ten months with his brother. Dean could not be buried under all that rubble.

Somewhere deep inside, in that same place where Sam cherished the memories of Dean walking him to school and fixing his scrapped knees, Sam knew that his brother couldn't be gone. He couldn't be dead because Sam had yet to say his goodbyes, had yet to say 'I love you'.

Ignoring the progressively closer lights and shouting voices, Sam fell on his knees, starting the long process of clearing the debris from the house. Somewhere under all that, Dean was alive and waiting for him to dig him up. He had to hurry.

His fingertips were turning in to pulpy masses of blood when a hand closed around Sam's shoulder and forcefully pulled him away.

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AN: Beta reading by the awesome Jackfan2, who this time, also provided the tittle :o) Thank you!


	2. Chapter 2

PARADIGM SHIFT

It wasn't long after the whole wood removal procedure that Henricksen began to realize that, as ideas go, this one had pretty much backfired on him.

Aside from the copious amounts of blood, which had barely slowed to a trickle despite the bush-league dressing he'd secured to the thing, Dean had yet to regain consciousness. Instead, he just lay there, twisting and mumbling on occasion but coming no closer to actually opening his eyes.

While he waited, Victor busied himself with clearing the remaining debris from the man whom he now considered his prisoner and getting them ready to go. The cavern curved up ahead and, from what he could guess of the couple of yards he'd ventured through earlier, they might actually have a chance of finding a way out.

Well, just as soon as Winchester rejoined the land of the conscious, that is.

It wasn't that Henricksen was averse to a little heavy lifting, but Dean far exceeded the term 'little'. Earlier, Victor had gotten a small measure of the weight of the man's muscle when he'd maneuvered him into a slightly straighter stance - the raspy sounds that Winchester made every time his chest filled with air were, at once, annoying and concerning - and there was no way in hell that Victor was hauling that murder's ass out of there on his back. The FBI paid him poorly to catch bad guys, not hernias.

"Mmm... n't rea... I'mmm n't re'dy-"

Victor leaned closer. Most of what had escaped Dean's mouth thus far had been closer to sounds and moans than actual words. Now, however, he could almost make out something. Maybe a heavy conscious manifestation, induced by the pain? A whispered confession?

Victor shook his head. He was loosing his mind. As if... this case had been a cluster-fuck since day one... why now, of all times, would he catch a break?

"N't read... ready-" Dean mumbled, his head turning to the side and pressing against the cold rocky wall. His breath puffed against the dark minerals, hot air fogging their icy nature.

Victor had been too busy moving around to notice it, but now that he thought about it, it was easy to see that the temperature inside the cavern had been steadily dropping.

Glancing dispassionately at his prisoner, the fed considered him briefly. Victor _knew_ he should take off his jacket and place it under the injured man, to keep Dean's body warmth from seeping into the cold rocks, to make him more comfortable. He also _knew_ that was the correct course of action, if not for the sake of helping a fellow human being, at least to stave off shock.

But he couldn't.

Images of Emily Bronson, the first victim in St. Louis, flashed in to his head, bright Technicolor snapshots of a young woman bled to death, terrorized to the very end, deprived of her dignity and life.

Rebecca Warren had followed and the amount of fright that this criminal... _this monster_ had been able to instigate on that woman had been such that, in the end, her tale made no sense at all. One time she would say that Dean Winchester tortured her, the other that he had saved her from something. What that _something_ was, not even she could tell. Poor girl would never be the same.

The fact that complete dimwits had handled the collected evidence at all three of the crime scenes had assured that both Emily and Rebecca would never be avenged.

Compiled DNA samples from both victims, while identical and compatible with the body that Winchester had buried in his place, proved inconclusive when compared with the man himself. Lab-rats-speak for 'close, but no cigar'.

It screamed incompetence in forensics, which, in a nutshell, was what the judge would end up ruling. How could they mess up DNA so badly?

Then there was Angela Mason's father: only a few days after her funeral, two men fitting the Winchester brothers descriptions had showed up at his office and home, harassing him about his daughter. The professor had been alarmed to the point that he'd begged the court to exhume his daughter's body. Victor could not forget the shallowness of her father's face when he recounted the state in which he'd found Angela's body... hole in her head... staked to her coffin... violated.

What kind of psychos do something like that?

"Ple... n't yet... S'mm-"

"Bet your dreams must be a real party feast... do people like you even have a conscious?" Victor asked, knowing that he was only talking to himself, but unable to keep quiet.

"S'mmy... don' wanna... not h'll... no hel-"

Henricksen's eyebrow went up. Hell? Was that where Dean Winchester's mind went when he was asleep?

A smug smile crept up Victor's face. If there was one thing that would turn him in to a man of faith was the notion that monsters like Dean closed their eyes and saw hell, that their conscious burned there for all the evil that they caused others. It seemed only fitting.

"I hope you do burn in there one day," Henricksen whispered in to the other mans ear, satisfied by the whimper that his words caused. "But not before you pay for your crimes up here, buddy."

The fabric of the shirt he'd used as a bandage was already starting to soak through and the tie that was serving as a tourniquet, to hold the whole thing together, wasn't doing much holding at all, the fastening not strong enough to put the necessary pressure on the bleeding. If they didn't shag ass soon, the only paying that Dean Winchester would be doing, _would_ be in hell.

"Wake up!" The FBI man ordered.

Grabbing one of Dean's shoulders, Henricksen squeezed, hopping to elicit some sort of reaction from the unconscious man. Already he could see his own breath. They needed to move out.

"Wake up!" Victor shouted, this time accompanying the words with a slap to the face. Dean's head moved only as far as the force of the impact sent it and aside from a whispered moan, there wasn't much of a reaction from the other man. "WAKE UP!"

Victor sat back on his ass, the walls swirling around him. The air was still dusty enough to make breathing hard and he was starting to suspect that Winchester hadn't been the only one banging his head against the floor when they landed. Leaning back against the cave's wall, Henricksen suppressed a chill when his shirt connected with the ice-cold surface. Raising a scrapped hand to his shaved head, the FBI man search for any breaks that might've gone unnoticed before, wincing when he touched a sore spot.

"YoUrrr FaULt."

Henricksen almost dropped his flashlight when the eerie voice sounded next to his ear. Turning around sharply, he was faced with the same shimmering walls and empty air. Looking down, Victor studied the face of his prisoner. Dean Winchester was as out cold now as he had been seconds before.

And yet, someone had just spoken inches from his face. "Who's there?"

"YOu kiLLeD mEee," the same voice whispered, words blowing air against the other side of the FBI man's face.

Henricksen trained the light on Dean's face. That son of a bitch! He was pretending to be unconscious to screw with his head. That had to be it...

Placing one hand over the improvised bandage on the prisoner's side, Henricksen pushed down, hard. "Let's see you play your little ventriloquist trick now, you little piece of shit!"

Dean gasped, his eyes opening only a fraction. The bloated pupils focused on the man hovering over him, pressing down on his wound. "T'fuc—what t'hell... are you doing?"

"Your tricks don't work on me," Henricksen announced, pulling his hand away from the other man's stomach. There was fresh blood, dark red against his palm, the smudge looking almost black when the FBI agent used his undershirt to wipe it clean.

"I know all about the cons you and your family pull, with the ghosts and the werewolves and whatever fictional monsters you come up with to trick people in to trusting you with their lives and their money... I'm not falling for that, you can rest assured."

Dean scrunched his eyes shut, teeth snarling with the pain. "What the fuck... are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the difference between real monsters and make believe crap... I'm talking about the stories you make up to justify the fact that you are a psychotic murderer, Dean, and that, right now, you're in my hands. Justice's hands... so stop screwing with me!"

plolqbplolqbplolqbplolqbplolqbplolqplolq

Dean raised his right hand, sweat breaking out all over his face at that small effort alone, and placed it over his aching stomach. His head was on fire, brain slowly being squeezed to a pulp by a very tight, and very heavy, metal vise.

His brain felt twice as large, but oddly enough, that didn't seem to translate in to more brainpower. In fact, it was getting increasingly harder to get a thought straight and remember where he was, why and with whom.

Sam wasn't there. Henricksen was. And they were trapped underground. Dean felt the need to occasionally remind himself of those three basic pillars of his existence for the moment. Details kept escaping his mind and every time he decided to focus on something other than those three points, he would get sidetracked and lose them.

Henricksen was here. Sam wasn't. They were trapped underground.

Henricksen's speech was distracting in and of itself. The man seemed to have hit his head harder than Dean, going on and on about imaginary voices. And Dean's ability to talk while unconscious, apparently.

Dean couldn't hear a thing. In fact, he could hear less than that. It was eerie quiet down there, just the occasional groan of wood and a distant plingplingpling of water dripping from the rocks. It felt too much like being unclosed inside a tomb for his liking.

Sam wasn't there. He couldn't be here.

Dean wasn't necessarily claustrophobic, but he would give anything to get out of this place. Thing was, just thinking about moving _hurt_, never mind actually try it for real. Breathing alone, made his insides feel like they were coming apart, muscle grinding against each other in ways that were not healthy or even humanly possible.

It felt like someone had stuck a fist inside of him and decided to leave it there, scrambling everything to hell.

They were trapped underground. Who was 'they' again? Sam wasn't there...

Dean closed his eyes and tried to calm his breathing. Why had he let Sam convince him to leave the first aid kit in the car? He could use a dose of the good stuff right about now... maybe Sam had gone back to get it? Was that why he wasn't there?

No.

Sam was with them when the whole house convulsed on them. Oh God! Maybe Sam was-

"Cat got your tongue?" The other man asked.

Dean startled. He'd forgotten about the other man. The face was sort of familiar, but he couldn't seem to put a name on it.

Who the other man was didn't really matter now, other than the fact that he could be a useful source do information. From the hostile looks that the man kept sending Dean's way, he figured that wouldn't be that easy.

"Where's Sam?" Dean asked, frustrated with his inability to just grab the man and shake some answers out of him. "Is he ok?"

It was too dark to see, but Dean could swear that he saw the black man roll his eyes.

"We're back to that, hum? Gave up on your little games, did you? Figure you'd be more persistent than that, Dean."

The black man knew whom he was, something that did nothing to make Dean feel any better with the whole situation. Dean had no idea what he was talking about, but the fact that he refused to answer his question only served to send his heart racing. Sam could be hurt... he could be trapped under all that rubble - Dean had to find him.

Turning on his side was like rotating himself on the edge of a knife. Tears sprung to his eyes, the roar of his own heart muffling the angry voice of the other man.

"--ow--ving? D--n't I tell y- t-- top bein--upid? Fine! You wanna move so much, we move!"

The arms that suddenly circled his chest were solid, smelling of dust and blood. When Dean's head was raised no more than a couple of inches from the floor, he cried out, white spots filling the dark cavern with bright lights and shimmering colors. "Stop!... Please... just-"

A familiar smell creeped out from all around them, quickly covering up all others. Ozone.

Dean might not remember how they ended up in there; he might not know who it was currently trying to get him vertical; he didn't even knew if Sam was dead or alive; but he did know what that smell meant. Danger.

"YOu kiLLeD mEee!"

Pushing the other man off of him, Dean frantically searched for his coat pocket. Fabric twisted around him, it took precious seconds to find the right hole and close his trembling fingers around the sharp grains of rock salt he'd stored there.

"YOu LeT mE BuUrN!"

The black man was still yelling at him to shut up and quit screwing with him when the shimmering figure of an old woman materialized above them and charged.

plolqbplolqbplolqbplolqbplolqbplolqplolq

"Get off of me!" Sam blared as soon as the restraining hand lifted from his mouth. He glared at the demon that had forcibly dragged him away from the collapsed house and circling feds.

Ruby had chosen such a fragile looking woman to possess that Sam sometimes forgot how strong and powerful she really was.

"You're welcome!" Ruby snarled sarcastically, dusting off her impeccable dust-free leather coat. "I just saved you from spending the rest of your existence reaching for the soap bar, but do I get any recognition for that? No, I get yelled at!"

Sam wasn't listening to her. Dean's time was running out as they stood there, wasting time. Dean's time was running out and she had dragged him away from the house.

"Where're you going?" Her shrill voice echoed amongst the trees' canopy that covered their sight of the dark night sky. A pale half moon was somewhere up there, hidden by a cluster of clouds.

"Back -Dean needs me."

"Dean's dead," Ruby announced, not even bothering to sound sympathetic.

There's no fear in her grey eyes when Sam swirled around and grabbed her by her thin neck. "YOU DON'T KNOW THAT!"

"Louder Sam," she whispered, voice raspy from the tight vice gripe. "I think there's a deaf fed a couple of miles that way that didn't quiet hear you."

Sam let go of her. There was really no point in it. It wasn't the demon's neck that he was crushing and even if it were, it would do nothing for the fact that he'd left Dean buried under tons of rubble and surrounded by feds, two miles back.

The reality of what was happening robbed the strength from Sam's limbs at the same time that a weight set on his chest, squashing his lungs, pressing his stomach tight until no air could get in, no bile could get out.

Sam's legs folded from underneath him and the younger Winchester collapsed to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut.

"You can't know that," he whispered this time. The initial certainty and power in his voice was gone, replaced by a feeble hope and a desperate need to be proven right.

Ruby sighed, cleaned her palms on her jeans and crouched beside the defeated hunter.

"There's a way to find out," she said, the sarcasm gone from her voice. "Come."

plolqbplolqbplolqbplolqbplolqbplolqplolq

"YoUR FaULt... YoUu kiLLeD mEee!"

The sound suddenly became solid, filling the air around them with a molasses-like consistency that set heavily against their chests. Henricksen's fingers convulsed around the flashlight, wishing more than anything to be holding his gun instead of a mere light beam.

The beam bounced off the shimmering walls, creating weird patterns and shadows that seemed to morph and changed right before his eyes. There were dark eyes looking back at Henricksen, a shadowy face in the rock, opened mouth in a silent scream.

A light suddenly flared and popped, like a boom flash, similar to those used in old cameras with gunpowder explosions. Then, materializing before their eyes, a form shimmered and stepped out from the rock. Moving closer, the illusion took shape and became real.

The gauzy figure lurched forward, zigzagging its way across the rubble, _through_ debris, impossibly moving slow and fast at the same time, undeniably moving towards them.

For the first time in a very long time, Henricksen felt helpless. He had no gun and something told him that there was no point in using his fists against the flickering figure.

The closer she got, the more details he could catch. The disheveled aspect of what was left of her clothes, the powdery look of her face, the emptiness of her eye sockets, the raw flesh of her shoulders that looked like it'd been burned to the bone-- and the sound...

God! The sound that was coming from the deep hole that served as her mouth -when she was not screaming nonsense words- that sound was pure despair, distilled pain and misery.

"Stop right there!" Henricksen shouted, managing to sound menacing and in charge, despite the fact that he was weaponless and clueless.

The charging figure, however, didn't seemed the slightest impressed with his commands.

Scrambling backwards to stay out of its reach for as long as he could, the FBI man was forced to stop and stand his ground when he reached the rock wall against which Dean was perched.

Blindly searching the ground around him, Henricksen sighed in relief when his fingers curled around a piece of twisted metal. He held it like a sword, bent on not going down without a fight.

A bone-searing cold, the likes of which he'd never before felt, set heavily against Henricksen's skin, numbing his fingers, stealing strength from his limbs.

When the old woman was close enough that all that Henricksen could smell was the decay and thunder in the air, her sightless gaze fell on him and Victor couldn't help but to be sucked into the void within those blank eye-sockets.

Inside, there was nothing but despair and pain, flames and betrayal.

Despite the cold that stole his breath away, Victor could feel the lick of fire, tasting his skin, boiling his blood, singeing the hair from his body, the light from his eyes.

Henricksen knew, without a doubt, that he was dying. Oddly enough, he was burning to death in a cold, dark cave, burning in a place that hadn't seen fire since the dawn of time, but even so, he burned.

Dimly aware of his surroundings, out of his periphery vision, Victor saw Dean's arm suddenly arch through the air, a spastic movement seemingly without propose or finality. The sound of grains hitting the wall echoed around them for a pregnant moment before the white figure of the old woman shrieked ominously into the enclosed space. The sound made Henricksen flinch. Then, just like that, the feeling of death disappeared, vanishing into thin air.

Henricksen sagged to the ground, his lungs expanding and taking mouthfuls of air like they'd never had air before. He blinked, unable to resist the temptation of pulling his dress-shirt up to see with his own eyes that his skin was not burned, to feel at the edge of his fingertips that his heart was still beating.

Fighting to calm his racing heart, Victor whipped the sweat from his upper lip, rubbed his hands over his shaved head, surprised to find the skin there wet as well. And maybe, just maybe he was stalling too, because he was a rational man, dammit. He needed time to think.

"What the hell was that thing?" He finally asked, when he was sure that his voice wouldn't wobble embarrassingly. "What the hell did you do to it?" That had to be some sort of light trick, some sort of illusion. But how could he explain the feeling of impending doom that lingered?

Dean was on the ground, one arm curled around his stomach while the other lay flat beside him. In his open palm, Victor could just make out small, white speckles of something grainy clinging to the sweaty skin. The stuff that he'd thrown at the old woman before she disappeared.

Judging by their size of the granules, they were too big to be sugar or powder and too white to be cocaine... maybe salt?

The FBI man blinked again. Had that killer just used a condiment to make the old woman disappear?

"What the hell is going on here?"

Two pinpoints of glassy green found his face in the dark, mouth contorted in to something between a smirk and a pained snarl. "Mazel tov... you just... popped your... ghost cherry," Dean whispered.

Victor's first instinct was to land a fist on his prisoner's face. This was exactly what Henricksen and his team had figured the Winchesters did; create and set up inexplicable creatures and seemingly impossible events, get some gullible and hapless victims to witness it, and sweep in to 'save' them. Monster and hero; the Winchester managed to find ways to play them both and, in between, gather more followers for their club of demented and lunatic psychopaths.

Only, there was no trick here. There was no possibility of a hoax here. No diffusion screen, no hologram device, no elaborate scheme set to fool anyone.

Just two guys trapped in a cave in and an old woman with hollow eyes that carried death inside of them.

Henricksen ran a trembling hand over his face, rubbing his eyes. Maybe he'd hit his head hard enough to have hallucinations, because there was no way that _that_ could have been a ghost... could it? There was no such thing as ghosts. Right?

"She'll be back soon," Winchester said.

Henricksen looked back at the man, realizing that he'd been staring at the same wall for the past ten minutes while Dean struggled to compose himself in to a somewhat breathing and alive person.

"She?"

Dean pulled his jacket closer to his body, teeth chattering inside his mouth. "The late Mrs..." he explained, pausing when his brain couldn't supply the ghost's name. "The one we came here to..."

Henricksen watched as the injured man sighed in frustration at the lack of coherent mental cooperation.

"And the thing you threw at her was-?"

"Salt... iron works too," Winchester pointed out, looking at the piece of rusty metal still gripped tightly in Henricksen's white knuckled hold.

The monsters that he was used to fighting bled. Henricksen knew where to hit them, how to react, what to do to assure his safety and the safety of others. He knew how to use a gun, a knife, a piece of wire, his bare hands-

This... this felt like being thrown in to the deep end of the pool before learning how to swim and being told that positive thinking was the best way to not drown.

And yet... Dean had just saved his life by doing something as simple as throwing a handful of salt at an old woman. For all Henricksen knew, positive thinking worked too.

"Health-concerned ghosts who disappear at the sight of salt... I don't know what's crazier: you believing that," Victor said with a dry chuckle, "or me believing in you."

It was like a giant knob had been turned inside the FBI's man's head, his mind quickly reprocessing all that he had read on Dean Winchester's file. And suddenly, Henricksen wasn't seeing a motherless son of a bitch who desecrated graves of young women to nail them to their coffins or burn their bones; suddenly he was seeing old black and white movies where vampires always dressed to the occasion who always managed to found redemption before a stake found their hearts.

Suddenly he was seeing relieved victims that were still alive thanks to these two men, instead of confused and naive people who knew nothing about nothing.

A whole new world of possibilities unveiled itself before his eyes and Henricksen couldn't help but doubt all the certainties and conceptions that he'd built over the past months about who the Winchesters were and what they do in their lives.

Because what he thought was real was now ebbing away in a cloud of dissipating smoke; and what he thought were illusions were becoming solid and real enough to pose a threat. His idea of monster was suddenly widening in to frightening proportions and, as odd as it was, Dean Winchester was slipping farther and farther away from that concept.

Henricksen's big epiphany was, however, lost on his meager audience. Dean's eyes were quietly but methodically searching the cave, frowning when whatever he was searching for failed to present itself.

"Where's Sam?"

For the first time since they'd fallen in, annoyance turned in to concern. It was painfully obvious that they were dealing with an enemy the likes of which Henricksen knew nothing about and now, his only source of information was so concussed that he couldn't even retain smallest bits of information for a few minutes.

"Freakishly tall... guy... puppy-like... eyes... floppy hair?" Dean explained, mislabeling Victor's concern for confusion on who he was asking about. "He's kind of... hard to miss."

"He's not here," Victor hurried to state, remembering how his silence usually caused Dean to try to move on his own before. "I'm sure he's ok."

It was Dean's time to chuckle, a humorless wet sound that made Henricksen wonder if that piece of wood hadn't nicked something that it shouldn't.

"What's so funny now?"

Dean shook his head. Victor could see his fingers curling and grasping more tightly to the fabric of his jacket and color draining from his face.

"Sam's never going to be... ok," Dean whispered, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. He didn't elaborate, but the FBI man could tell that the statement wasn't about cave-ins, or the fact that they were wanted by the law, or even that Sam was on the run with half of the FBI on his ass... No, this was about something deeper, something more earth shattering than cause and consequence.

It tasted of fate, and crazy as that sounded in Henricksen's mind, he couldn't shake the feeling that it was also true.

"We need to... move," Dean said, opening his eyes and staring at the fog-ish cloud of breath coming from his mouth.

Henricksen found himself nodding. He had felt the drop of temperature as well, but had no idea if Dean's sudden urge to get out of there was because he believed that the... ghost... was coming again or because they really should try to find a way out. Either way, Henricksen couldn't agree more.

Stashing the long piece of rusty metal he was holding in the empty gun-holster in his belt, the FBI man crouched near Dean, trying to decide on the best place to grab him and pull him up. "This is gonna hurt," he announced, finally deciding on grabbing one arm and hooking a hand around the injured man's belt hoops.

This time, when the injured man gasped and whimpered at the change of position, Henricksen felt his stomach twitch in sympathy and concern. This would've been much more easier if in his mind, Dean Winchester was still the monster that he believed him to be.

But now- now that he had to forcefully cause the other man pain just to get them out of there... now that Dean Winchester had lost his non-human hues, Henricksen could see him in a whole new and different light, the concerned brother, the soldier in a war that nobody knew was being fought- now Henricksen hated himself for being forced to this to save their lives.

Dragging his feet and resting most of his weight on the FBI man, Dean managed to move somewhat forward, walking straight in to what looked like nothing but a dead end to him.

As it turned out, the passage was truly there, almost hidden beneath some rubble and small enough that neither man could walk across it at their full height.

Before either Henricksen or Winchester could work out the mechanics of getting themselves in to the tight space, the shrill scream of the ghost shimmered across the air, turning the rock walls in to claustrophobic hands and the air as cold as ice around them.

plolqbplolqbplolqbplolqbplolqbplolqplolq

Sam didn't so much find the cave entrance, as he stumbled on it.

"We're here," Ruby announced with a barely hidden smirk as Sam picked himself from the ground.

The sharp rocks dug against his hip, where he'd banged down, but Sam barely took notice as he dug a flashlight from his backpack and aimed it inside the cave. The beam of light barely cut two feet in to the imposing darkness.

"What's here?"

Looking from the small, roundish entrance into the ground, Ruby arched one eyebrow incredulously at Sam. "Tell me you two chuckle-heads at least studied the map of the region before taking this job?"

Sam avoided her gaze. He wouldn't go so far as to call it 'studied' but he and Dean had looked at the map. They're interest in it, however, had been more about the layout of the Garrison farm rather than the region - their interests more above ground than necessarily geological. After all, they would be digging for bones, not gold. "And?" He asked, trying to sound like he had some clue about what she was talking about.

"Aaaand," Ruby draw out, "the words 'cave-network' ring any bells?"

Sam blinked, turning his flashlight to the hole again. "You saying that the Garrison's house had a cave underneath it? That we can get to Dean through here?"

Ruby rolled her eyes. The heavy hope lacing Sam's words was like acid to her ears. "No... I'm saying that, as far as wild goose chases go, this is where you can start yours."

Sam ignored her. It had been a rhetorical question, anyway. If there was even the slightest chance that he could get to Dean through that uninviting hole in the ground, Sam was taking it.

~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0

AN: So... what was supposed to be a 2 part, sort of became a 3 part. What can I say... more whump for Dean? *g*

As always , a big thank you to Jackfan2 for her awesome beta work. All remaining mistakes are mine, because I can't help but twick the damn thing until the last possible moment :o)


	3. Chapter 3

PARADIGM SHIFT

Dean could feel the moment that the ice-cold fingers wrapped themselves around his chest and yanked him away.

Eyes closed, there was no time to appreciate the disorienting sensation of flight before he landed painfully against the rock wall. The impact rattled his teeth and Dean could taste blood in his mouth, on his lips. Pain ignited in his side, a deep unrelenting fire, and warm liquid ran down anew from his waist to pool sickly against his jeans.

Dean was afraid to open his eyes. Everything hurt so badly that, for the first time in his life, he was afraid to look, terrified to discover that his body might be broken beyond repair.

When Dean was around sixteen, dad had taken him and Sam to some half hidden, half illegal bookstore in the middle of downtown New Orleans. This store was rumored in the hunting world to have some of the best, the oldest books on demon-lore and spells and John owed Bobby, so they'd come with a short list to fill.

The guy running the place had once been a hunter, a damn good one, according to John, but the 'had been' part had raised Dean's curiosity. Even at sixteen, he knew that hunting wasn't something that you just gave up on. Or retired from, for that matter.

The reason for this particular hunter's change of profession became clear as soon as the man greeted them warmly at the door.

A run in with the wrong side of a poltergeist that had been haunting an old train had resulted in two crushed legs. The man moved around his shop like there was nothing to it, but to Dean's young eyes, the sight of those curled up pants clipped above two non-existing knees had become the epitome of everything that Dean never wanted to see happen to any hunter.

Of all the consequences attached to the hunter's life style, the one this man in particular had suffered was what Dean Winchester feared the most.

It wasn't the danger, or the pain or even death. It wasn't anything that came and went with a hunt. It was the permanent damage, the incapacitating injury that would stay with you forever, altering your existence in to a mockery of what it was before.

His back was on fire, but it just hurt too much to actually be broken. Shaking the cobwebs from his head, Dean barely had time to figure where was up and where was down before the ghost was right in his face.

The old woman was fugly.

Dean suspected that she hadn't been all that pretty to begin with. The afterlife hadn't been kind to her either.

Fingers fumbling to reach the only weapon that he had on him, Dean cursed his lack of luck when he couldn't feel anymore salt granules in his pocket. There wasn't much to begin with, just a handful to appease the deeply ingrained precautionary measures that Dean had never been able to shake off ever since his days at school, when it was easier to stuff his pockets full of salt than to go around brandishing the switchblade in his backpack.

And now he had nothing. Reacting on instinct, he pulled his legs into his chest, an unconscious gesture of protection of his injured side. Dean looked around, trying to find something, _anything_ to fight the ghost.

The place was too dark for him to see much; whatever debris and rocks Dean could see was illuminated only by the eerie, bluish glow of the old woman advancing on him. Looming over him, she smiled a toothless grin.

"**YoUR FaULt... YoUu kiLLeD mEee!**"

Dean opened his mouth to say no, to send the spirit to hell, to smart-mouth her somehow... but nothing came out. Nothing came in.

He smelled smoke. Burned flesh. The same mix of pork and putrid that was too familiar to him, too many 'fresh' corpses burned in his past, not enough time in the ground to separate their flesh from the living.

Dean looked at the spirit's empty eyes – at the fire that raged within them. The heat was such that he could feel the flames touching his skin, reaching out to him from the very pit of Hell.

Shaking his arm in attempts to extinguish the flames, Dean watched in terror as the blaze danced on his skin, refusing to let go. It was so real; he could feel the muscle beneath sizzled up and slowly cook. Then, sharp daggers of pain started shooting up and down his nerves, stealing the breath from his lungs, logic from his brain.

Oh God! Not yet... he wasn't ready for it yet. He said that he was, he pretended that he was, but nothing could be further from the truth.

He still had months to go, he still had so much that he wanted to do before dying... why was he being robbed of that? He had to make sure that Sam would be alright, that Sam knew how sorry he was for all of this... he still hadn't told Sam how much he loved him.

"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry," Dean mumbled, hands raised to his face, fingers helpless to stop the fire from nibbling at his eyes. There was something wet sliding down his face, warm and salty, impervious to the lapping flames. Blood, most certainly. Tears were made of water and there was none to be found in Hell.

"Snap out of it!" A strange voice boomed near his ears. A dark hand darted from no where and started shaking his shoulder so hard that Dean was sure it would eventually come loose from its hinges. "Wake up Dean!"

Dean blinked, lashes sticking wet and heavy against his face. He looked around. Gone were the old woman and the fire that surrounded him. Dean worked hard to focus on the face of the man leaning over him. He knew that face. What was he doing in Hell? "Henricksen?"

The black man rolled his eyes and placed the rusty piece of metal he had been holding on the floor, near Dean's right leg. "Now he knows me," the fed whispered, using both hands to pull Dean straight and look at his bandaged side.

"What-" Dean hissed in pain when the man's fingers brushed against the raw wound. "-happened?"

"Turns out you were right about the iron thing," Henricksen supplied, sounding a bit surprised himself.

"You know about... ghosts?" Dean asked in confusion. He couldn't wrap his mind around the idea that the FBI agent, who'd been hot on their asses for so long, knew anything about the supernatural world. But then again, not much was making sense to him right now. "Where's Sam?"

Dean felt more than saw the other man sigh.

"Not here," Henricksen mumbled, pulling his tie tighter around Dean's waist. "Can you focus on the here and now for a minute? I need you to tell me what to do."

Dean blinked away the tears that had somehow pooled in his eyes. For a moment he thought that there was some truth behind the whole 'seeing stars' bit, until he realized that he was looking at the shimmering walls of a cavern.

"Hum?" Dean _eloquently_ asked, the sound squeezing through teeth clenched in pain.

"The ghost, Dean... you need to tell me how do we protect ourselves against it long enough to pass through that hole in the wall and get the hell out of here."

More unreal than the stars trapped inside the walls and the fact that just minutes ago he was burning in Hell, it was this new Henricksen, who not only wasn't trying to put him behind bars, but was actually trusting Dean.

Maybe this was Hell after all, this twisted version of reality where things were close enough to sound real but always somewhat off, rubbing you raw with inconsistencies and slowly driving you insane; maybe this wasn't Henricksen at all, just some demon using his face to mock Dean.

Whoever it was, Dean was just glad it wasn't using Sam's face... or his dad's. "Not falling for... that one... you black-eyed... sonofabitch!"

"Not falling for what, you brain damaged ass? We discussing eye-color now?" The other man asked, managing to sound genuinely confused.

Dean snorted, glad to have find out the demons' ruse. "Henricksen spent months... hunting me and Sam down... why would he... be helping me... now?"

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It was hard to tell what was a result of the head injury and what was just crazy talk. Not when you don't know the guy from Sunday. Not when you've just spent the last hour realizing that all the things you _thought_ you knew about the guy, were wrong.

Even in the dimly lit cave, Henricksen could see that Dean was messed up. God alone knew what the man had seen when the ghost touched him.

Because Victor remembered all too well how it had felt when the old woman had reached out her frozen fingers to grip his temples. It had been bad, and grim and he'd felt like he was going to die. But the look on Dean's face when he'd managed to reach him?

It was something else entirely. It was fear.

And if there was one thing that Henricksen knew his files had gotten right, it was the fact that Dean Winchester didn't scare easy.

"I'm not helping you out of the goodness of my heart," the fed confessed. "I just wanna get out of here alive and, right now, whatever's inside that messed up head of yours, is my best chance."

Dean scrunched his eyes shut, nose twitching in pain. Right now, his head didn't seem that much inclined to aid them in any way, shape or form.

Dean took a deep breath, or tried to; the air caught in his throat and sent him into a fit of wet coughs that looked painful enough for Henricksen to flinch in sympathy. The wracking agony soon carried him back to unconsciousness once again.

Which left the FBI man alone with one pissy ghost and no help whatsoever from the one person with a frigging clue on the matter there.

So, what did Henricksen know about ghosts?

The FBI man snorted silently, catching himself recalling movies like _Ghostbusters_ and _Poltergeis_t for reference. How screwed was he if all he had to cover his back was Hollywood?

It would be nice to have Venkman around to give him some tips though, or maybe one of those gizmos they use to trap ghosts and the Stay Puffed marshmallow man.

'Stick to the facts', the fed reminded himself. The grip on the piece of metal he had in his hands grew tighter. Dean had told him that iron worked, and Victor had seen the ghost disappear right before his eyes when he'd swing the thing on it.

Salt. Dean had taken some of the stuff from his jacket pocket.

Keeping a weary eye out for ghostly reappearances, Victor knelt by the injured man, intent on searching his pockets.

A bloody hand caught his sleeve in a tight grip. Startled, Victor looked up, straight in to pain filled green eyes and a ghostly white face. "Take it easy man... just looking for the condiment-weapons," he whispered reassuringly, not knowing which version of Dean he was talking to right now; the cocky bastard, the confused man or the frightened to death wounded. "That ghost lady is about to chew on our asses again and I got nothing but a rusty stick to defend us."

"We need to... close the door," Dean said cryptically, his gaze fixed on the tiny hole that signaled their exit. "Rock salt circle... around the tunnel... entrance... she won't... she won't be able to cross it."

"A ring of salt," the FBI man confirmed, his voice laced with disbelieve. "Of course we need a ring of—do you have salt enough to do a circle? Wait... would a triangle do, or does it have to be some specific geometrical shape?"

"No," Dean answered, showing him his empty jacket pockets. "And yes... it needs to be... a circle."

"Got a plan B in those pockets? Because it looks like we're fresh out on the condiments."

Seemingly ignoring the question, Dean trained his unfocused gaze downward, eyes searching the ground for something. Finally, when it appeared he'd found what he was looking for, he stretched, grunting at the pull on his wound, stubbornly reaching out to grab at a fragment of shiny rock until he clutched it in his hand. It was the same type of shiny rock that lay all around them.

Without preamble, Dean put the rock to his mouth and licked it.

"What the f..." Henricksen started, his eyebrows frowning above his scrunched nose before he whacked the rock away from Dean's hand. "Are you insane or did your brain just break?"

Dean looked at him, confusion marking his expression, like he'd forgotten the other man was even there. Or maybe because he was expecting someone else to be there with him.

Henricksen could see that Dean was dying to ask where Sam was, but he could see the man curbing that desire in order to deal with the most urgent matter. "Halite," he whispered instead.

"Hali—am I supposed to know what the hell you're talking about?" Victor asked, unable to decide if this was actually going somewhere or was just the man's head injury talking.

"Halite is... sodium chloride... your basic caveman... rock salt," Dean supplied with an feeble attempt to smirk.

Henricksen stared at him, a hint of astonishment in his voice mixed with surprise. "A minute ago you had no idea who I was... but the chemical composition of a damn rock you can remember?"

"I liked chemistry," Dean replied, choosing to not voice the implied '_I don't like you'_. His words were quickly followed by a long, sluggish blink, signaling his rapidly growing tiredness. "Beside... I still don't know who... the fuck you are."

The FBI man studied the injured man at his side. The one that had taken him by surprise by managing to pull off not one, but two daring escapes right under his nose. Dean's resourcefulness hadn't stopped surprising him yet. "Same here, buddy," Victor said sincerely. "Same here."

When the ghost attacked not two seconds later, the fact that Victor had been ready, swinging without hesitation his rusted piece of metal, wielding it like some sort of twisted, blunt sword, spoke heavily of just how fast one's life could go from normal to freakishly weird.

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"So... this is what you guys do, hum?" Henricksen asked, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his sleeve. Most of the bigger pieces of Halite were near the surface, but plucking them off the rock wall was still hard work, especially at the fast pace the FBI man had set for himself.

The amount of rocks that they would need to cover their backs wasn't particularly large, but it still had taken him a good part of the past twenty minutes to get enough. "You go around the country, dealing with other people's ghosts, filling their basements with salt?"

"Salt... and burn'em," Dean supplied, his voice barely above a whisper. Despite the fact that Henricksen had maneuvered him to stand semi-seated against the rock wall, the position wasn't doing much for the injured man's breathing.

The fed looked at him, his eyes sharp as he tried to judge the seriousness of Dean's statement. Remembering the several accusations of grave desecration involving burned coffins, he had to agree that reality was much more insane than anything that he could've imagined.

The other man coughed wetly and, despite the distance between them, Victor could still see the black dots that decorated Dean's chin afterwards. He had to move faster.

Victor had insisted on tightening the bandages around the man's torso, managing to actually stop the bleeding completely, but from the color of his face, it either wasn't enough or Victor had just been too late.

In between the spirits visits, the cave wasn't all that cold, but still Dean wouldn't stop shivering, despite the fact that he was now hoarding both his and Henricksen's jackets.

"I thought the old lady burned to death," Victor supplied, his arms filled with pieces of rock as he went to place them around the exit. The other man was clearly slipping away and Victor needed him talking, needed to know that the Dean was still breathing.

"Not... enough... apparently."

Silence stretched between them. Victor looked back, making sure that Dean's chest rose and fell, debating over whether to finish the circle or abandon his task to see for himself.

"I don't get one thing though," he went on casually, deciding that assuring their escape was the far more pressing matter. Or at least the only matter about which he could actually do something about. Dean was probably bleeding out from some internal injury that Henricksen couldn't see or do anything to stop, so, for now, all he _could_ do was to keep the injured talking; keep him engaged in life. "Salt sends these bastards away, right?"

Dean uh-huhmed quietly, his eyes still closed.

"And this cave is basically one giant salt container, right?"

Dean cracked one eye open, apparently guessing where Victor's questions were heading.

"How can this ghost even be here?" The fed asked anyway. "Should all this mineral in the rock vaporize her away?"

Dean sighed. "Same principal... as ghost... ships," he offered.

Henricksen finished the circle and hurried back to the wounded man. Temperature was dropping again and, if Dean was right about this, he wanted them both on the safe side of that circle before their _friendly_ ghost dropped the next dime on them. "And what principal might that be?"

Dean opened both eyes, apparently surprised by the sudden nearness of the other man's voice. Henricksen could see him force himself to relax, sharp reflexes that, even dimmed by injure, were alert and present. "Ghost ships... sail on... salt wat—"

"So, it's a matter of quantity?" Henricksen offered, trying to figure the best way to get them moving. If it had been hard before when Dean was still somewhat moving, it would be nearly impossible now. And yet, staying there had long stopped being an option.

"Orga—" Dean hissed when Victor touched his bandaged side to make sure that it wouldn't come apart in the next few minutes. "Organization... versus... chaos."

Henricksen just nodded. "Ok, man... we're getting out of here," he announced as he grabbed both of Dean's arms and pulled him up against him. "You up for that?"

"Nah," Dean whispered faintly, his head lolling back. "'m comfy... right here."

"None of that now... don't you want to go see Sam?" Henricksen asked in despair. He felt like he was talking to his six year old niece and with about as much chance of winning this argument as he had with her.

"Sam?" Dean asked hopefully, eyes focusing on the man in front of him. "Sammy... left," he whispered, heavy lids closing once more. "Not... here."

Henricksen let his head hang in defeat. Damn the man and his big, sorrowful eyes. His second ex had eyes just like that. He even let the bitch keep the house, despite her screwing around behind his back.

The rumble started low enough to be dismissed as their own stomachs complaining about lack of food. Henricksen's senses, however, were on high alert. Hands filled with the almost-limp Winchester, the fed turned his head around, searching for the source of the new sound. The vibration was all around them.

The smaller rocks on the ground were hopping, for lack of a better word. Like popcorn in the microwave, the debris was twitching and jumping off the ground, seemingly eager to defy gravity.

At first, Henricksen's gut twisted at the prospect of an impending earthquake.

He'd been through a couple of quakes in his life, most of them when he'd been stationed at the Los Angeles office. It hadn't been fun, by any definition, that sensation of the ground escaping your feet, that pressing feeling that nothing is secure and everything around you can turn on your ass and chew massive amounts of it off.

Still, those experiences had been either in the middle of the street, where Henricksen could take refuge in the sturdier structures, on inside said structures, the ones that were supposedly prepare to withstand the nastiest of the planet's bowl movements.

None of them, however, compared to the feeling of being _inside_ the planet as it shook.

When the first rock flew, Victor was almost relieved. He'd known earthquakes to do a lot of things, but send things' flying sideways wasn't on the list.

The ghost was back and she'd changed tactics. No more getting close enough to them to allow for any defense. She had decided to start playing dirty.

"Come on, we gotta move, NOW!" Henricksen shouted, hissing in pain when a larger piece of debris hit his back.

Dean mumbled some protest or another when Henricksen grabbed both his wrists and threw him over his shoulders, ignoring the sobbed gasps of pain as Victor tried to serve as human shield as best as he could even though he knew that it was an almost impossible task.

Even through the ground tremors, the fed could feel the painful spasms that coursed throughout the other man's body at the abuse, but with sharp rocks literally raining down on the both of them, he had no time to be gentle.

Making a mad dash for the tunnel entrance, Henricksen wasted no time in crossing over the circle of rock salt. The flying debris stopped immediately.

Carefully settling Dean as near to the entrance as he could, the fed stood up and looked back to the rest of the cave. There was a thin trickle of blood, sluggishly dripping down the side of his face, that the man annoyingly clean away, taking no notice of what it was or where it was coming from.

Victor had far more pressing matters.

The flickering figure of the ghostly woman was right there, on the other side of the circle, staring back at him.

For a moment, Henricksen thought that maybe Dean was wrong about this, that maybe he'd been a fool to trust the word of a man he'd been hunting for the past few months.

Certain that she had them trapped and helpless, the ghost growled at them, murderous intent in her empty, dead eyes and a victorious snarl in her hollow mouth. The ground under her naked feet had turned in to ice, white crystals spreading like a veil of death at her every step.

Victor looked longingly at the metal shaft that he'd abandoned in lieu of carrying Dean. They were so screwed.

The ghost charged forward, her grim smile fierce and ominous. It was almost funny when she hit the invisible wall created by the salt circle and shrieked back.

"Ah!" Henricksen let out in surprise, mostly at the fact that they were still in one piece. "Take that, you gassy skunk!"

The ghost charged one more time, like a fly that can't quite believe that the glass window can keep it from getting out. The result was the same, the shriek grew louder.

"**YoUrrr FaULt.... YOu kiLLeD mEee!!!"** The ghostly voice boomed all around them.

"Yeah, yeah... file a complaint to your congressman," Victor said, promptly ignoring her and turning his attention back to Dean.

Who had taken advantage of him being distracted to slip in to unconsciousness sometime during their short journey.

Henricksen sighed. In between all the moving around that he'd been through and what the FBI man had to do next, it was probably best –for both their sakes- that the wounded man was out.

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"Dean!--- DEAN!"

"Gezz... bring the whole cave down on our heads, why don't you?"

Sam turned his flashlight around and pointed it straight at the demon's face. In the dark, like she was some sort of freakish cat, Ruby's eyes reflected nothing but blackness when light hit them. "Shut up, " he hissed curtly and sharp before turning once more to the long path ahead of them. "DEAN!--- DEAN, CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

"I'm only trying to help here... but if you want to join your brother and be maggot food too, hey! be my gue-"

"We've been walking for more than an hour... you sure this is the right cave?" Sam asked swiftly, cutting short any further hints that Dean was anything but alive.

Even in the dim light, Sam could _feel_ Ruby's eyebrow raising. "I never said this was the right cave."

Sam stopped, abruptly enough for his feet to burst out a small cloud of dust. "What?" He said slowly, his voice dropping three tones until it was nothing but a menacing growl. He took one step towards the demon, his eyes black in the dark of the cave.

Ruby took one step back, her hands raised in a appeasing manner. "Hey, easy there big boy... don't go all caveman on me."

Sam's fist closed around the lapel of her jacket. "Tell me one good reason why I shouldn't just snap your neck right here, right NOW!"

"It was the only way to keep you from doing something insane... like, oh, you know, going TOWARDS a whole group of armed feds!"

"You lied to me," Sam realized, knowing that he had no right to be surprised by that at all.

"Humm," Ruby started, pausing to look at herself, "demon—we do that, on occasion. Besides, I never said that Dean was inside _this_ cave. I just reminded you that there's a bunch of them in these parts."

Sam let go of her jacket, shoving her back. The pained grunt Ruby let out when her body hit the dark, hard rock wall, didn't even registered in the young hunter's ears. "He's not here," Sam said with conviction. It was the most certain he'd been of anything in the past couple of hours. "I'm going back."

This time around Ruby didn't try to stop him. She didn't even try to argue back. Maybe she knew of the knife that Sam had clenched between his fingers inside his jacket pocket; maybe it was the fact that she knew it wouldn't matter either way.

Sam was slightly disappointed when, after walking double-time back to the cave entrance, he turned around to discover that the demon was long gone.

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Life was funny. In that '_let me screw with you in ways that nobody but myself will think hilarious_' kind of way. Henricksen was far from catching the butt-end of this particular joke.

Not even a couple of hours ago, he was certain -positively convict- that there would be no way, come hell or high water, that he would be hauling Winchester's heavy ass out of this cave on his back.

And for all intents and purposes, he kind of stuck to his promise. Of course that, carrying him _like this,_ was far, far worse. It was also the only way.

The tunnel was simple too low. Four feet high would be too short for a short person and neither Henricksen nor Winchester were it.

There were two ways they could crawl through it: on their backs, crablike, or belly-down, wormlike. Either way, they were crawling. Well... Victor was crawling. Dean was out.

Making use of both their belts, Henricksen laid down and positioned Dean over himself, chest to chest, strapping each of Dean's legs to his and effectively gluing the unconscious man to him.

The proximity was awkward, to say the least, but it allowed him to both have his arms free in order to pull them forward, and to keep an eye on the injured man, in case he decided to take a turn for the worse and give on the shallow form of sort-of-breathing that he was doing for now.

Victor could feel every pouf of air coming out of Dean's mouth, hot against his neck; could feel his own stomach getting doused by the man's bleeding wound; could feel the heat coming off of the other man's skin. It was the closest he'd been to another human being ever since that all fiasco with Jenny, from Humans Resources.

Dean was out, but he wasn't quiet. Henricksen was starting to realize that the man was probably incapable of doing that. Words and fragments of thoughts and sentences kept being whispered against his skin and Victor shivered, not because of the intimate contact, but because of what was being said.

They were the same mumbled words as before, as far as he could tell, the same ramblings about fire and hell and Sam, always Sam. Only, now that he'd open his mind to the possibility that there were things in this earth and beyond that escaped his comprehension and knowledge, the ideas behind those mumbles took form, became scary places, became more than delusions and verbosities of a deranged mind. They became tangible.

Those were real fears, real concepts, real places that Dean was whispering about and the despair behind those words made Henricksen's gut twist. He moved faster.

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Maybe it was an figment of his imagination, maybe it was his body telling him that it had enough, maybe it was his momma eternal optimism that had finally found its way in to him, but Victor could swear that the air was getting fresher around them.

He'd started to notice the slight slope upwards that the tunnel had taken about thirty feet ago, mainly because he'd started sweating twice as much with the redoubled effort, but the FBI man had refused to get his hopes high.

Now, though,-- now he could definitely feel a breeze up ahead. The light hadn't changed all that much but, then again, as far as he could tell, it was still night outside. "Hey, man! Can you feel that? We're getting out of here!"

Dean was quiet. Victor stopped his progress, resting his sore back against the hard rock and twisting his arm around so that he could get two fingers on the other man's neck pulse.

His own heart was beating too fast, too hard, both from physical exertion and the perspective of rescue so near. All Henricksen could feel under his fingertips was his own pulse, rapid, strong.

"Come on, man... don't do this to me now," the FBI man whispered, surprised by the genuine concern in his voice. They'd been through too much for Dean to just conk out now, when freedom and medical supplies were just a few feet away.

There.

Like he was actually obeying the commanding voice, Victor could feel the flutter of Dean's heart against his fingertip. A quiver of a butterfly's wings, but there.

"Just hang in there man, I'm getting you out of here."

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Sam banged open the door of his –their- motel room and sank to the floor. There were fresh tears running down his face, cleaning his skin from all the dirt and soot that he'd accumulated over the previous night.

Dean was gone.

There was no way to avoid that fact any longer. Sam was now the last Winchester standing and Dean was... Dean was burning in Hell. It wasn't fair, it was too soon.

Sam had reached the collapsed house just in time to see the FBI team pulling up stakes, loading up their circus for their next stop. Dust from the med-evac's rotating blade still stirred as the white chopper gently took off, taking with it the last of the injured.

The feds had called off their search for survivors. All bodies had been accounted for, Sam overheard.

Clinging to the feeble hope that Dean might've been in one of those choppers, Sam had managed to find out to which hospital the injured had been taken, only to discover later that federal agents alone had been admitted. No unidentified bodies, no out-laws. Just FBI personal.

According to the officer in charge at the site of the crumbled building, Dean Winchester was pronounced dead on the spot, his body left to be retrieved later, when the heavy machinery arrived to clean up the debris.

Not one soul was overly concerned with giving a murderer a swift final resting place. Not one soul would ever know the man that Dean was. No one would know what he'd done for others. What he had done for Sam.

Dean's duffel was open, abandoned at the foot of the bed he'd slept in two nights ago. Sam could see his brother's red shirt, the one he loved to wear when he was less than tanned, saying that the color made up for the 'frigging cold places that they were always stumbling upon'.

Underneath it, the shiny metal of one of Dean's guns, was peeking. Innocent and harmless, just sitting there, amongst dirty laundry, waiting for the time when it would be needed.

Sam had no idea why he picked it up, but the weight of it in his hands felt reassuring. Felt like a way out.

Sam almost jumped when the phone in his pocket started to tremble. Numb fingers fumbled with the device, putting the gun away and opening the phone. It took a while for Sam's watery eyes to focus enough to read the tiny green letters on the screen.

That couldn't be right. The display announced that 'Ozzy' was calling. Dean was going through a 'Black Sabbath' phase and the British rock star was the latest of his aliases.

The young hunter's heart leaped to his mouth. It had to be a trick, some sort of trap set by the FBI to catch him too. The vibrating cell twisted in Sam's hand one last time and went silent, screen darkening and taking with it his brother's name.

Realizing that he'd stopped breathing, Sam hiccupped a mouth full of air. The loss of the failed call left behind a bitter taste similar to having left Dean behind to die alone.

Dean's phone had been in his jacket pocket. Dean always carried his cell in his jacket pockets. What if, somehow, that had really been Dean calling? What if Dean was hurt, or lost, in need of help, and Sam had just stood there, looking dumbly at his ringing phone and failed to pick up the call that could save Dean?

Sam could taste the bile in his mouth, feeling sick to his stomach at the possibilities alone. Hurrying his uncooperative fingers, he quickly hit the speed dial. Before the call on his side could connect, Sam's phone started ringing again.

This time around, Sam wasted no time. "Dean?"

"Hello, Sam... I have someone here who really needs to see you," someone said on the other side. Someone that was, most definitely not Dean.

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This was a trap. There was no possible way that this was anything other than a trap. But still, Sam's heart was light and fluttering against his chest as the nurse took him to room 504. He barely heard her warnings about 'looking worse than it was' and 'medical induced coma' or even 'slow but sure recovery'.

Sam just needed to prove himself that that wasn't really Dean.

Opening the door with some trepidation, Sam was relieved to discoverer a dimly lit room and noticeable absence of the sound of guns being cocked.

There was a strong smell of disinfectant inside and the soft, timed and mechanical whirl of a ventilation machine. The monitors above the bed provided a sort of greenish glow that made the bed and its patient look eerie.

The further into the room Sam moved, the more certain he was that, any minute now, the feds would be bursting through those doors to take him in. He couldn't even tell if the man lying on the bed was his brother or not.

Feeling a desperate need to make sure, before his days of freedom were over, Sam sprinted to the right side of the bed. The patient's face was covered in bandages, his eyes tapped closed. Other than the full lips that stood slightly parted to allow for the passage of the clear tube that was attached to the whirling machine, there weren't much of the man's features that Sam could see. It could be anyone. Any man with full lips.

Carefully leaning over, Sam gently pulled the bed covers down, exposing the upper part of the man's chest. He had to be sure, he had to see.

There were more bandages there, another tube draining liquid from the man's chest. And there, right above his left collarbone, a star-shaped tattoo. "Dean--" Sam whispered, the name like a prayer in his lips. Despite the medical paraphernalia circling the bed, despite the horrible amount of bandages covering his brother, despite the impending threat of getting arrested looming over his head, Sam was smiling. He was grinning so hard that his ears hurts. Dean was alive.

"There's nothing wrong with his face," the same voice that had spoken on the phone, spoke from one of the dark corners of the room. "It was the only way I could think of to stall the reveal of his true identity for a couple of hours."

Sam didn't bother looking up, his gaze focused on Dean, counting every rise and fall of his chest, marveling in the feeling of warm skin underneath his fingers. Lacing his fingers around Dean's lax hand, Sam finally registered Henricksen's words. "Why would you wanna do that?"

"Because it would be extremely hard for my superiors to believe that Dean Winchester is dead and buried under tons of rubble if I checked him in here under his true name, with his face on display for anyone who checks the news to see who he really is," the Fed said matter-of-factly.

"Why?" Sam repeated. The last time he'd seen this man, he was gloating over the fact that he'd managed to capture both of them. Despite what he felt inside, despite the roller-coast of emotions that Sam had been riding, making it seem like days had gone by, the fact was that only a few hours separated _that_ federal agent from this one now. This one who had, apparently, lied to his superiors to cover for a wanted felon, who had gone as far as register Dean as a federal agent himself so that he could have all the medical attention that he was, obviously, in dire need of.

It made no sense. People didn't just pull a 180 like that. Not without a price attached. "What's the catch?"

"No catch," the black man said, honesty so solid in his tone that Sam could almost see it in bright colors. "Just paying my debts... your brother--" he stumbled, looking for the best words to describe Dean, "-- your brother is one hell of a hunter."

Sam blinked. Resisted the urge to pinch himself. Couldn't decide what surprised him more: the high praise or the fact that Henricksen seem to know exactly what they did and what that task compromised.

"And after what I saw, after what I learned... I couldn't think of anything worse than to deprive people of one of the good guys that they need the most," Victor went on, his gaze fixed on the unconscious man on the bed.

Feeling himself slipping in to uncomfortable ground, the FBI man cleared his throat, straightened his back and finally looked at Sam. "Doc says that, if all goes well, the ventilator can come off tomorrow morning... I suggest you get him out of here shortly after that."

Sam felt himself nod, numb from the whole conversation and from the fact that Henricksen was actually helping them, that, somehow, during the time that they spent together, Dean had actually managed to bring the law man on to their side.

Henricksen paused near the door, his hand on the handle. "Try to stay off our radar from now on, ok? I like my job, and I would like very much to keep it," he smiled, deep dimples decorating his scratched and bruised face. "Just do me one favor, ok?"

Never one to be given anything for free in his life, least of all his brother's life, Sam held his breath, afraid of how hard the other shoe would fall.

"For some reason -that I'll sleep better at night if I never find out-, your brother seems to be under the impression that hell is waiting on him. Just... make sure that hell, wherever that is, stays free of good men. Take care of him."

Sam tried to smile in response, his grip tightening unconsciously on Dean's hand. His face felt stretched beyond measure, beyond flesh and blood. The promise hurt his soul from the immensity of its reach, but it was one that he'd made to himself a long time ago. "Don't worry... I will."

The end

AN: That's it, folks! Massive amounts of gratitude go to Jackfan2, for her wonderful work in this story.

To all of you that have read and reviewed this, one big teddy bear hug and a bucket of your favorite candy.


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